Often the corporations take the route of least resistance - employing dispensable workers who don't live in countries they're mapping [1], and aren't given proper training.
It seems that southeast Asia (e.g. Thailand) is the major place for such dubious mapping efforts. [2]
There's also a minor conflict of authority: paid mappers (like all mappers) should defer to the community, but they have a manager who they answer to.
In my opinion not everyone has the skills to contribute, and at least if they're volunteers you can tell them (politely) to fuck off and be more likely to succeed with it (and not be outnumbered by the army of corporate drones).
On-the-ground knowledge is the OSM's gold standard. With megacorps in question routinely spending billions on frivolous stuff, they should have instead equipped the local OSM communities with gear to take 360 photos and GPS loggers to enable those on the ground to survey their local areas.
Isn't it potentially the opposite? If an independent, volunteer mapper contributes a poor edit, someone from the community has to reach out to them individually. This is hard since there's no prior relationship, and no expectation that the person will even take any advice on editing.
Contrast that to a major corporate contributor: the people leading these corporate mapping teams are all talking. Both to each other, and to leaders in the community like prominent volunteers, OpenStreetMap Foundation board members, etc. If a corporate contributor makes a bad edit, one of those _existing relationships_ can be used to help put processes in place that might prevent not just that one individual, but any other contributor paid by that company from making the same error again.
IMO at least, that process scales a lot better. And as OSM continues to grow that will be even more valuable than it already is today.
The energy you put in helping a new volunteer mapper along rewards the project in the long run for those who become long-term (semi) frequent contributors. With a corporate mapper you either hit a wall of misunderstanding due to limited English and, excepting English, no map-local language skills, and any time you invest in that mapper is limited in effect, because retention at such jobs seems low.
Some companies do listen when you provide feedback, and others just have some community manager¹ who doesn't really know anything at a deeper technical level handling all the communication with OSM's volunteer corps of mappers.
There is a company in Minsk that is doing edits worldwide based on the output of a set of slightly outdated linters, and it's disappointing to see that they could get much better feedback and linter input by listening to the remarks made by us volunteers, but that would require the attention of one of the few employees with in-depth knowledge, which they haven't planned for.
1: Another gem of inappropriateness was trying to communicate with the Dutch OSM community via Google Translate mangled Dutch. (The vast majority of us can manage English quite well, thank you.)
You pretty much summed up their incompetent modus operandi, let me just add they're a company that maintains a presence of their clients (e.g. retail) at various online maps and business directories alike.
See also [1]
Having said that, the tool that they use to conflate customers' data with OSM data [2] is interesting, even if it comes with minor performance problems when listing all projects. (Currently returns 502 error, worked fine a few days ago).
I think one can appeal to the morals and desire to be good/useful with a community mapper, but one cannot with a corporation, especially a publicly traded one.
If Facebook decides that the metadata format/style for a particular field should be X because otherwise they'd have to spend $______ of engineering resources on reworking their mobile app and fuck the OSM community which has decided it should be Y, for completely valid reasons that were debated and decided upon by the community....and then all of their hundreds of 10-cents-an-hour drones start submitting changes with the new style...the community is screwed. Especially if it accepts money from Facebook, because there's a power imbalance no matter how much paperwork you have saying "thou shalt not get anything from thy donation."
If you want a great example of how corporate involvement corrupts - look at Firefox, which has been caught not only with its hand in the Collecting User Data cookie jar, but inserted software for the makers of a TV show (Mr. Robot) and software nobody asked for, with no way to disable it (Paper, I think it was/is called?)
Not only did they get caught with their hand in the Collecting User Data cookie jar, but when someone brought it to the public's attention via the bugtracker, the bug was locked almost immediately by a mozilla employee. Then that was reversed. Then the project manager for said project who had previously worked at a data analytics company re-classified the bug as secret/internal-only, and it quietly all disappeared under the rug.
For sure, that's a legitimate concern if/when there's one major corporate contributor that doesn't have to play along with everyone else.
Part of what makes the current OSM situation work is that nobody is bigger than everyone else. If Facebook wants to do their own thing, they're going to be going against Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the rest of the community.
We've seen from both the world of capitalism in general and definitely the software world that consolidation eventually happens, so maybe this situation is inherently unstable and doomed to fail. But IMO the OSM community should work to make it last as long as possible.
Often the corporations take the route of least resistance - employing dispensable workers who don't live in countries they're mapping [1], and aren't given proper training. It seems that southeast Asia (e.g. Thailand) is the major place for such dubious mapping efforts. [2]
There's also a minor conflict of authority: paid mappers (like all mappers) should defer to the community, but they have a manager who they answer to.
In my opinion not everyone has the skills to contribute, and at least if they're volunteers you can tell them (politely) to fuck off and be more likely to succeed with it (and not be outnumbered by the army of corporate drones).
On-the-ground knowledge is the OSM's gold standard. With megacorps in question routinely spending billions on frivolous stuff, they should have instead equipped the local OSM communities with gear to take 360 photos and GPS loggers to enable those on the ground to survey their local areas.
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Armchair_mapping
[2] https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewforum.php?id=46 (AFAIR many of people posting here are Western immigrants to Thailand, so take correction for that).